I have a HP 17-BS021CY laptop I got off of QVC last year which originally came with Windows 10. I replaced that with Debian 9 (Stretch) which I was planning on doing anyway even before I ordered it. Don’t really care to much for windows. Anyway, Debian 9 worked out of the box, figuratively speaking, everything worked fine.

I wanted to load a plymouth theme like I did on my other computers with Debian 7 (Wheezy) or 8 (Jessie). Never used Debian 6 (Squeeze), which all used the same method for doing this.

I search the Internet and all I found was the same instructions that I have for Debian 6 (Squeeze), 7 (Wheezy) and Testing on 8 (Jessie) but can’t find anything on activating a plymouth theme in Debian 9 (Stretch). So I assumed that if the three previous was done the same way so is Stretch. So I proceeded with the fallowing:

I first installed the plymouth with:

sudo apt-get install plymouth

Then I had to edit the initramfs-tools modules with one of the fallowing appropriate modules for my graphics card:

For Intel:

# KMS intel_agp drm i915 modeset=1

For Nouveau (nVidia):

# KMS drm nouveau modeset=1

For ATI:

# KMS drm radeon modeset=1

My card is a Intel HD Graphics 620, so I used the:

# KMS intel_agp drm i915 modeset=1

I opened the initramfs-tools modules with:

sudo nano /etc/initramfs-tools/modulesand edited the modules from:

# List of modules that you want to include in your initramfs. # They will be loaded at boot time in the order below. # # Syntax: module_name [args ...] # # You must run update-initramfs(8) to effect this change. # # Examples: # # raid1 # sd_mod

to:

# List of modules that you want to include in your initramfs. # They will be loaded at boot time in the order below. # # Syntax: module_name [args ...] # # You must run update-initramfs(8) to effect this change. # # Examples: # # raid1 # sd_mod # # KMS intel_agp drm i915 modeset=1

Then I set the theme, but first I needed to see what themes I have. (Showing Below)

sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme –list

fade-inglowjoylinesscriptsolarspacefunspinfinityspinnertexttribarI used spinner, so I used:

sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme spinner

Then I applied changes:

sudo update-initramfs -u

I did get an error the lack of firmware files, so I did the fallowing:

sudo apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

Then I repeated the applied changes:

sudo update-initramfs -u

Then I rebooted my system. The system booted just fine, but with the same debugging text. No graphic theme. So I went back and reset the default plymouth theme, but this time, even though I got no error about the plymouth-drm, I tried to install it anyway with:

sudo aptitude install plymouth-drm

and got this message:

No candidate version found for plymouth-drm Unable to apply some actions, aborting

I opened Synapic Package Manager and did a search for plymouth-drm and found that the package is not even available in (Stretch). So I have no idea on how to set the plymouth. Can someone show me how to do this in Debian 9?

I've never needed to change the defaults for initramfs in any way to get plymouth working, on any version since squeeze. I think that if you have changed the defaults from 'most' in the initramfs.conf that might still be necessary.

Just add splash to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub and you should be good to go. Don't forget update-grub after editing.